Who or what brought down Lance Armstrong? It's honestly too soon to say. USADA definitely played a key role, as did the Justice Department. Current and former pros told their stories, as did some persistent journalists. People who were personally hurt fought for the truth to come out. But another group of individuals played a significant role in this decade-long saga—commentators on social media (primarily Twitter) who kept digging and prodding and refusing to let this story die. We asked a handful of the most prominent voices to share their thoughts—on the last few days and the last ten years. Though their narrative is still unraveling in 140-character increments, here are their stories, in their own words.

Not Pat McQuaid@UCI_OverlordTime to Dig Deeper
The Oprah interview showed us how small of a man Armstrong truly is

Time to Dig The Oprah interview showed us how small of a man Armstrong truly is

By @UCI_Overlord

For several years many people in the cycling sphere have been doing their best to expose what has been declared—despite Armstrong's assertions otherwise—the greatest sporting fraud in history. Those people who have tried to expose the truth and scale of the fraud have faced what no person should ever experience, including threats, bullying, stalking, hacking, and shots across their bows in the press. Cycling was, in my mind, hijacked by not only Armstrong, but an entire sphere of individuals who went about a campaign to greedily line their pockets at the expense of the sport.

This why a few years ago I decided to start my campaign to share with the general cycling public what was (and still is) going on behind closed doors at the expense of those who just wanted to race and ride. What I saw happening to those individuals who spoke out against this bizarre cabal of cycling power players is why I chose to adopt a pseudonym on Twitter for my activities.

After spending three years directly documenting Armstrong's dubious activities and assisting in lampooning some of the more entertaining aspects of the Armstrong narrative, it was rather surreal sitting in a London hotel room staring at a laptop screen, waiting for the circus to commence. The key question in my mind was just how far was he going to go? Would he be remorseful? Would he apologize? Would he detail how they tricked the system?

After the initial questions from Oprah and his repeated acknowledgements of his dirty deeds, the interview devolved into one word.

Disingenuous.

After he answered the initial questions, Armstrong fell back into old habits: excuses, half-truths, revisionist history, attempts to manipulate the narrative as he did his entire life. He played the sympathy card with comments about his son and also his comments about therapy. Armstrong played from the script most of us who followed his career expected, to the letter.

Armstrong's Oprah interview was his way to try to gain back control over his own narrative using the parlor tricks he has used his entire career. However, he lacked the trademark larger-than-life Armstrong bravado. He displayed signs of insecurity. He lacked the conviction he displayed in his fights with foes such as Paul Kimmage. Most of all, I witnessed in real time Armstrong disassociate himself from his previous life, without any real signs of visible remorse.

Witnessing the interview left me with a profound sense of sadness for Armstrong. Here was an opportunity for him take steps to right the wrongs of his actions. To reach out to the hundreds upon hundreds of people whose livelihood he directly impacted in a negative manner. I was willing to give him a second chance. I was willing to support his efforts to change if he demonstrated signs of remorse. Instead, he solidified my resolve to continue to dig deeper into his connections to see how far cycling's roots have rotted.

Armstrong thought he was bigger and better than all of us. The Oprah interview showed us how small of a man he truly is and will most likely continue to be for the remainder of his life.

Given my vocal stance on this topic it is easy to assume that recent events would give me a sense of accomplishment, even victory, but this is not the case. Good people’s lives were inexorably altered. The sport I have loved for 30-plus years has become a punch line. It is hard to look back at the wreckage of the last couple decades and feel anything but disappointment.

Instead of spending the last 10 years as a revered elder statesman, Greg LeMond was forced to defend himself against a well-organized smear campaign. Despite this, Greg retains his youthful enthusiasm for the sport. A guy who just loves riding his bike, talking about bikes, climbing big mountains. A 51-year-old Dave Stoller. The sport needs people like Greg LeMond. It needs people with the tactical acumen of Frankie Andreu, the moral compass of Christophe Bassons, the caring nurturing of Emma O’Reilly.

To most, Armstrong’s admission did not come across as genuine. It came across as a final, desperate, attempt to polish a turd, to preserve a revenue stream, to remain relevant. Over the coming months, the Armstrong myth will be analyzed, dissected, dismantled. The sport of cycling will move on. Lance will be cycling’s crazy ex-girl/boyfriend that you don’t want your friends to find out about. A small minority will murmur, “Maybe we should have ignored it.”

Ignoring the issue is what got us to where we are today. Ignoring riders dying in their sleep. Ignoring a rider like Riis winning the Tour. Ignoring Ullrich climbing the Arcalis like he had a motor on his bike. Ignoring the lessons of Festina, Freiburg, and Puerto. Addressing the issue may be painful today, but in the long term it is the right thing for the health of the sport.

Despite the current turmoil, I see many areas of hope for the sport. WADA is a strong voice of reason and enforcement. The media and the fans are far more educated, willing to ask questions, and push for answers.

The sport is dramatically cleaner then it was 10 years ago. It offers opportunity to those who say no, those who previously were pushed from the sport. This spring hundreds of thousands of fans will be on the side of the road, cheering their heart out, at Paris-Roubaix, Flanders, Liege. This July millions more will cheer the 100th Tour de France. And in America, many will come to the realization that their love for riding their bike is about more than just one guy.

The Yellow Troll In the end, the monster turned out to be the very thing he despised most

By @festinagirl

“If I can get a minute a year, a minute a year isn’t that much...When you’re 30 you’re not gonna be 9 minutes faster than you are at 21”—Inside the Tour De France, David Walsh

Admitting you lied is not the same as telling the truth….

L’Equipe gave the game away when they described Armstrong after his crushing performance on the climb to Sestriere in the 1999 Tour de France as ‘Extraterreste.’ Once you knew the code, the secret language of cycling, the message was clear—Lance Armstrong was yet another doper who had just won the maillot jaune. And would keep winning it for the next six years with performances both increasingly formulaic and unbelievable. It was like the biggest, worst-kept secret in sport but it really wasn’t about the bike—it was about the story, the myth that transcended everything. Lance Armstrong: Cancer Survivor. That was what brought the hordes of journalists to the race, parachuting in from the news desk, there to report not on the greatest sporting event in the world, but on one man, one human-interest story. And so it gained traction and momentum. And so the dissenting voices were silenced, derided as trolls, sued and vilified with the full collusion of a press that wanted more and more of that incredible story.

When did I know Lance Armstrong was a doper? When he threw Christophe Bassons—a young rider writing articles from the race under the pseudonym M. Propre (Mr Clean)—off the Tour. That was the moment when Armstrong could have changed the face of the sport—when he could have stood shoulder to shoulder with the Frenchman and spoken out for him, not against him. That would have been a genuine game changer. Instead Armstrong spoke for the omerta. The Tour of Redemption became the Tour of Same Old Same Old.

I knew he was a doper in 1999. I started posting my views—my unsubstantiated, unevidenced opinions—on every cycling forum going. I’ve watched the defense of Armstrong change from ‘he would never take dope’ to ‘he never tested positive’ to ‘everyone was doing it’, ‘it was a level playing field’ and finally ‘but he did so much for cancer.’ And slowly the evidence began to emerge. I stopped being one of the lone, crazy Internet voices because there were more and more of us convinced of the same truths—Armstrong had doped, his team had doped, the systematic doping exposed by the Festina scandal had never gone away. But the time it really hit me, when I realized my gut feeling had been right all along, was during a DM conversation with Bill Strickland after his “Lance Armstrong’s Endgame” piece. I remember feeling—what? Triumphant? Not really. Vindicated? Certainly. Pleased? Not really. What I felt was right. I’d been right all along based on nothing more than my visceral reaction to watching Armstrong ride his bike. Always trust a woman’s intuition ;)

So watching Lance Armstrong’s carefully controlled “confession” to Oprah Winfrey offered nothing new—not even the opening declaration of doping. Old news, Lance. What I wasn’t prepared for was the absolute lack of empathy, the smirking sociopath who giggled when he couldn’t remember whether he’d sued Emma O’Reilly because he’d lost track of all those lawsuits, who grinned when he declared that, whatever he did call Betsy Andreu, he never called her fat. Who choked up only when his own reputation, his loss of sponsorship was impugned. Who knew that Lance Armstrong—the man who ruled his team with a rod of iron, who bullied and cajoled teammates into doping for his self-interest, who attempted to destroy the lives and reputations of those who spoke out against him, was such a self-pitying little choad? As @ny_velocity so beautifully put it, you could see him parsing each statement through the formula “what would a real person say?” That this man had been allowed to get away with it for so long—by the UCI and sports organizers who were desperate to crack the American market, by journalists desperate for access, by fans desperate to buy into the cancer Jesus myth, by everyone who declared he was intimidating and charismatic and not to be messed with—was the truly shocking revelation of the Oprah interview. That he wove half-truths and obfuscation and downright lies into the narrative of his much trailed “confession” was only to be expected from a man desperate to reframe his own myth. That the monster turned out to be the very thing he so despises—a fucking little troll—was the only pleasant surprise.

July 2005, in a little bar just off Rue George V in Paris, a conversation about what we had just witnessed for the seventh time. At the table next to us four Americans clad in yellow Livestrong shirts got up, stood by our table, glared at us, reminded us what an incredible story it was, reminded how much he had done for the “cancer community," and even if he did dope, he was only doing what everyone else was doing. They walked out.

July 2010, standing on the roadside just after the Champs around 7 p.m., a RadioShack car drives by on the other side of the road. Veering last minute it pulls over to me, the windows wind down, and the occupants flip me the bird and the car drives off. Fast forward to 2013, and Oprah asks Lance "Did you take performance enhancing drugs?" "Yes." "Did you take EPO?" "Yes."

I don’t know what I was expecting to feel—joy, happiness, revenge, anger—but all I ended up feeling was numb. Then it slowly dawned on me what he had said, and I thought, "Finally, this is over, Lance will admit, he will implicate Ferrari, Bruyneel. He will damn the UCI, express remorse, apologize to all the guys he cheated, the guys he lied about, the people he lied to, cycling can be cleansed, it’s all over and we can move on."

The trouble is, it isn’t really over. We got an admission, we got limited apologies, but we also got an Armstrong that remained defiant. An Armstrong that wouldn’t admit what really happened in that hospital room. An Armstrong that says Ferrari is a good guy, who never mentioned Bruyneel, who praised the bio passport, and insists he rode clean in 2009. An Armstrong who still denies allegations of payments made to USADA despite overwhelming evidence, an Armstrong that still says he was only doing what everybody else was doing. An Armstrong that refuses to name names, that claims to have been given a "death penalty," an Armstrong that has the gall to suggest that he deserves to compete again.

It’s then I realize, things haven’t really ended. In 2013, just like 2005, Armstrong is still only doing what everyone else was doing, he's still hiding behind Livestrong, and he's still, like 2010, flipping everyone the bird.

I didn't think Lance would ever admit doping, but it was absolutely outside my realm of thought that I'd see Jonathan Vaughters' face on Access Hollywood. Or hear Billy Bush say "USADA." I'm left unsatisfied not knowing if Lance or Oprah ever drank their water with the quaint stainless steel straws. Nevertheless, it is AD 0, After Doprah. First we take Aigle, guided by the beauty of bikes.